Once a Rebel... (10 page)

THE CONVOY
pulled away and rumbled off into the distance, leaving Hayden and Shirley standing on the edge of the Gibbston Highway, daypacks in their hands. Twuwu’s massive head poking out the back of the trailer grew smaller and smaller in the distance until she pulled it back inside her crate.

Shirley did a slow three-sixty, taking in the dramatic view around them. This part of New Zealand’s South Island was a topographer’s delight, all ancient ranges and green river valleys with turquoise water lying far below. On the horizon, snow-capped mountain peaks were protected by a layer of white cloud.

‘So, here we are,’ she breathed.

‘They’re expecting us?’

‘They know we’re coming today, just not when.’

And thanks to Caryn and Twuwu being the first piece of freight off the
Paxos
, they were hours ahead of what she’d forecast.

They started walking towards a distant car park to check in. Beyond that was an old steel and stone suspension bridge that forded the river rushing
by fifty metres below. And dotted all over that were people. Everywhere. Even though it wasn’t yet mid-morning.

A long scream punctuated the serenity like the cry of an eagle soaring overhead, chased, moments later, by cheers and whistles.

She sucked in a breath.

Hayden glanced at her. ‘Nervous?’

Until that moment, she hadn’t been. She’d been way too busy being distracted by Hayden’s emotional withdrawal. But given how her body reacted to simply walking up the
Paxos
’s gangplank, she suddenly doubted whether she’d be able to step out into the nothingness of open space at all.

Cord or no cord.

Fear was not a good way to get something like a bucket list achieved. She blew the breath out carefully. ‘I guess we’ll find out.’

The organisers slotted them in after the present batch of jumpers had gone through. They waited for the first hour on the observation deck, which hung out high above the gorge, amongst the friends and families of those taking the leap. As the morning wore on, the deck got more and more slippery as those taking the plunge climbed back up the side of the valley, wet, and then joined the spectators to vicariously relive their experience.

‘That’s a good sign,’ Hayden murmured close to her ear. ‘If it was traumatic I doubt people would stick around to watch others going through it.’

Trauma. Something else she hadn’t thought about. She’d been so focused on how she was going
to get out there at all she hadn’t really thought about whether or not she’d ever recover from it.

The growing spectator crowd pressed them closer together and Hayden slid an arm around behind her to keep the soggiest of them back. Soon enough they were funnelled out of the crowded area to the two ornate stone towers that anchored the bridge to the land at both ends. A production line of safety instructions and advices began there and Shirley busied herself with taking them very seriously and making an endless stream of decisions.

‘Single or tandem?’ the young man in the bright T-shirt asked.

‘Single,’ she said. Just as Hayden said, ‘Tandem.’

She looked at him. He lifted an eyebrow. ‘Do you seriously think you’re going to be able to do this alone?’

She glanced over the edge of the bridge at the sparkle of blue water so very far below. Not as far as in the movies, but far enough to kill you if you got it wrong. There was a couple jumping together as she watched and it wasn’t … intimate … in the way tandem skydives were. They just stood next to each other.

Until they plunged, of course.

She dragged her eyes back to the young man. ‘Tandem. Thank you.’

‘Bob, touch or full immersion?’

‘Uh …’ It was like ordering a pizza. Mozzarella or feta? She glanced at Hayden, lost.

‘You want to get wet?’ he translated.

No. She didn’t want to do this at all, as it turned out. But her mum would have wanted the full splash-down experience. ‘Full immersion?’

Hayden smiled at her uncertainty and murmured, ‘That’s my girl.’

They shuffled forward. Only one station from the one with rubber ropes involved. Oh Lord …

A girl met them this time, even younger than the first and with a heavy Welsh accent. She took them through the safety talk again and outlined the procedure for getting out of the water at the bottom.

‘Relax,’ Hayden murmured in her ear.

Her tight throat translated into a squeaky voice. ‘This place is run by child backpackers …’

He laughed and shuffled her forward, right to the opening on the side of the red iron bridge. It wasn’t glamorous—far from it—but the men doing the tying on at least did look as if they’d been shaving for longer than a year.

Ahead of them a young woman jumped, and then a fifty-something man.

Surely if someone with silver hair could do it then she could do it?

A heavily tattooed arm waved them forward.

Her feet locked to the bridge as surely as if they had been bolted there. ‘I can’t do it.’

Hayden looked back. ‘Yeah, you can. Look how much trouble you’ve gone to getting here.’

She pressed back against the side of the suspension bridge. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can’t do this.’

Behind Hayden, the man lowered his arm and started towards them. She instinctively curled her
fingers into Hayden’s shirt in case the big guy just picked her up and threw her over. His arms immediately curled around her. ‘What about you just step out there with me. Take a look?’

She’d been looking all this time—what was going to change about it out there? She shook her head.

‘Come on, gorgeous.’ The operator smiled, reaching them. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks. You’ve got a fourteen-year-old behind you.’

She turned to check on the veracity of that. Sure enough, a toothy kid smiled back at her.

‘Is this your first time?’ she asked.

He shook his ginger hair. ‘Fourth. It’s cool.’

She looked back to Hayden. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘It’s cool.’

She didn’t want to be cool; she wanted to be alive. Then, right hard on the heels of that thought, came another one—they were doing this in the first place to
feel
alive. To experience life in all its forms.

Including its terrifying ones.

Her foot peeled off the deck.

‘That’s the way,’ the operator said and whistled for his compatriot, who hung two large white lengths of rubber rope on their bollards.

Hayden curled his fingers through hers and led her forward.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ she whispered up at him.

‘Yep. But I’m not about to let you see that. On principle.’ He winked at her. ‘Anything Shiloh can do, I can do.’

Shiloh.
She could do it.

She let herself be shuffled out onto a platform fixed to the side of the bridge and she let the safety lesson wash over her. Something about the little yellow boat that would come for them when they were done and about keeping your feet together.

As she heard the words, someone snapped two thick blue straps around her ankles like fabric handcuffs, forcing them together. Then they did Hayden’s. It meant they could shuffle but not walk out onto the timber dive-boards that got them clear of the bridge. One was skinny, the other wider. For two.

Hands guided her out onto the wide one and Hayden shuffled up next to her.

‘Okay?’ His glance held genuine concern. ‘Ready?’

Her chest tightened so hard she could barely get a word out. ‘No.’

‘To which?’

‘To both.’ The blood rushed past her ears the way the river below them roared down the gorge.

‘Take a second, Shirley,’ he whispered close to her ear. ‘Appreciate where we are.’

She forced her head up, away from the milky-blue water deep below, forced herself to think about where they were and what they were doing. How extraordinary it was. How stunning the landscape was.

‘Look at me …’

She brought her eyes back to his. They were the same blue as the tumbling water below. For one
fanciful moment that actually made all this better because falling from a great height into Hayden’s eyes was something she could easily imagine. And not imagine hating.

Her pulse settled just a fraction.

‘This is for your mum,’ he said. He lifted the hand that she hadn’t realised he still had clasped in his. ‘We’re doing this because she couldn’t. And I really can’t imagine a time or a place that we could possibly be closer to her than here, doing this crazy wrong thing. Look around and tell me that gods didn’t carve these mountains, that angels don’t roost amongst those trees.’

She did, and she couldn’t.

‘We’re going to step out together, Shirley, into this magical, mysterious air. And it’s going to glide us down safely to the boat below like God’s breath.’

She stared up at him, her icy fingers clenched tightly in his, breathing as fast and shallow as she had after their kiss. Every single thing she knew about him and his past evaporated in that moment and he was just a man she trusted, a man she admired. A man heavy with flaws but so very heavy with brilliance, too. A man who could get her through this and any other challenge she ever had in life.

She smiled, even if it did wobble. ‘You’re so full of it, Tennant.’

His head dropped and his smile broke sunlight across the whole valley. ‘But did it work?’

She looked inward. Her pulse had leveled out,
her breathing had eased and even the distance below them seemed to compress into something survivable. This was just like jumping off the high board back in school.

A really, really high board.

She turned and faced outwards, keeping her hand curled in his. ‘It worked.’

Behind them the tattoo guy counted down.

Five … four …

When he got to three, Hayden turned suddenly, bent and pressed his mouth to hers, hot and hard.

One.

Gravity tore their lips apart as they fell forward, free and fast, and her stomach heaved. The sound coming out of each of them was much the same, just harmonised. Then the straps around her ankles tightened into a fabric vice and her free fall arrested and she was dunked bodily into the Kawarau River before being yanked out again and hurled back into the air like a rag doll.

Her smaller size meant she bounced in opposition to Hayden, laughing and sobbing and crying out to the gods that she’d just defied by surviving such a fall. Life coursed through her veins like the drug it was, and she simultaneously felt the exact position of every cell in her body. Every decision in her life suddenly grew acutely clear—the wrong turns and the right. Above her dangling self she saw the yellow pickup boat moving into position and the pressure of her full weight on her ankles started to bite. Her hair pointed in long, straight, drenched shards to the earth.

‘Oh, my God!’

She turned to face Hayden, hanging upside down like Spiderman next to her. He reached out a hand, stretched out a finger and snagged one of hers, pulling her close as the pickup guys hooked her bungee with a boat hook. It took only a minute to pull them down into the boat and release the ankle boots. She fell, as heavy and inelegant as a load of fish from a dragnet, into the base of the boat. Hayden sprawled in next to her. Their cords vanished back up into the sky.

There were no words.

There was no past and no future.

There was no one in the world but them.

She twisted in the puddle on the floor of the boat and threw her arms around Hayden, overcome. Their wet, heated bodies fused together along with their lips. His hands bunched in her wet hair and pulled it out of the way so that his mouth could raze her own. She sucked in his air and his smell and the very flavour of him and pressed herself more fully against him, desperate for more. Wondering how she’d survived this long without ever feeling this.

Her head spun more now than during her free fall.

He twisted her into him and dragged her across his lap as the little boat began to move to the edge of the gorge. She fed off his heat and gasped at the furnace of his touch.

It was the gasp—or maybe the touch—that drew a tactful throat-clear from one of the two
men running the boat. ‘Adrenalin,’ he volunteered. ‘We get this a lot.’

She immediately stiffened and went to pull away but Hayden simply lifted his lips and pulled her back to lie in the soggy bottom of the dinghy, staring at the sky. Together. His heart hammered right below her ear where she rested on his chest. Hers matched it. It hadn’t stopped pounding since she’d first stepped onto the bridge all the way up there, and it was still repeating as hard as their outboard motor now.

As she lay there using Hayden as a pillow, the cadence of the thumps and the punctuation of his breaths formed a hypnotic blanket. Slowly … so slowly … her pulse eased, her breath returned and her mind was quiet.

‘Land ho,’ one of the two men said as the dinghy bumped against the edge of the gorge. She would have scrambled out anyway but it was doubly tough in saturated clothes that clung and inhibited her progress.

What was it with her and Hayden? She seemed to be forever plucking sodden garments from her body when he was around. This time she didn’t bother. If he wanted to stare at her wet butt as he followed her up the long, steep trail back to the top of the gorge he could knock himself out.

It wasn’t as if they were strangers any more. Not after that kiss. Or the one before it.

‘Retinas intact?’ she asked, back over her shoulder, when she should have been apologising for launching herself on him.

He laughed through the puff of scaling the gorge wall. ‘So far so good.’

The climb became torture, so close behind the chemical rush of the jump and the muscle collapse of recovery, and took all her strength and air. Conveniently, it also excused her lapse into silence.

She used the time to think.

What had just happened?

He might have kissed her briefly at the top of the jump but it had been more of a solidarity kiss, a kiss for courage. What they had just shared splayed out in the bottom of the boat, despite the audience, was something else altogether. Something far more dangerous.